Diablo III launch

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I am having as much fun as I hoped I would have with Diablo 3. I couldn't be disappointed since I spent 20 minutes on D2 and then went back to BG2 but was mostly hoping Blizzard and my old WoW community would be able to supply me with a few weeks of gaming. It seems like they will. My wizard is closing in on 60. Just started Hell difficulty and it is tricky, my experience is that the game is harder in a group than solo but that might change on higher difficulties. I love my wizard, I love the glass cannon aspect. I play with a monk, demon hunter and a barbarian and my damage is almost twice of theirs and can get higher when I use cooldowns but I have no HP. I have spent six years playing dps in WoW and the only thing that mattered there was your damage. 1 more damage was way better than 1000 more life that is my mind set. I can do this in D3. If I snooze and get cornered I am dead but if I play it right I see the hordes melt before my eyes. Very satisfying. I reckon I will finish it Inferno with my wizard and maybe another class or two and then be done. I am feeling that I get value for my money though. It is first now on Hell though that you can't just zerg everything. You do need some tactics and careful pulls.

As I understand things bosses are easy and drop crap loot to stop people from doing the same boss runs over and over and to give some variety to the game. Mini-bosses and elite packs are somewhat random making all dungeons slightly different every time you run them. I am not sure what I feel about the AH. I get all my gear from the AH. The drops are so random that you are gimping yourself by not buying stuff on AH. This means that there isn't really much of a "loot thrill". I don't really care what drops, I found a really good weapon for me a few days ago. It was incredible and I felt really lucky and thought that I was set for a long time. Then I went to the AH to check for something else but I thought lets look at weapon as well just for fun. Found a weapon with more than twice as high dmg as the super weapon that dropped which itself had been twice as good as my previous weapon and it didn't cost me much in game gold. In game gold of which there is an abundance. They are limiting the amount of items you can sell on the AH (10 at a time), there should be a limit on how much you can buy so the drops actually matter and not just are something you either disenchant or try to sell yourself.

 

Yeah, but I seriously doubt that these people geared up their characters for inferno by getting stuff at the auction house. For one, hardly anyone had reached inferno difficulty, and so hardly anyone was receiving drops in inferno difficulty. Secondly, any uber drops players received up to that point in inferno were likely kept by the player acquiring the item. Gamers don't sell stuff unless they have something better or equivalent for their own use.

Or at least the builds are very fluid with the ability of changing skills. You can even have an alternative set of gear in your stash, and you use a different gear and skill setup for different battles. With attribute and skill points removed from the game, and the ability to switch skills in use, a build can easily be switched from one type to another merely by changing equipment.

 

My playstyle is similar to yours joacqin and I've been wondering for a while why it works. If this were D2, we'd be be running at the first sight of Lightning/Aura Enchanteds or mobs like Gloams. I think it's because resistance (damage mitigation) actually works better in this game than sheer HP, especially in Hell/Inferno. In D3 Intelligence both affects resistances and the damage output of WDs and Wizards. My own build can survive 1-2 hits before dying in Inferno, and he only has ~20k HP. I've heard of WD builds with 40k+ HP getting one shotted in Inferno. I'm guessing their resistance weren't up to par.

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That's one way of putting it. Adapting to the situation is crucial if you want a balance of DPS and survivability, though I always keep one or two of my favorite skills. I even change my primary attack constantly to reflect which act I'm currently on.

 

Every class in D3 is a dps class. It's all about removing the mobs, en masse, as quickly as possible.

 

While surviving. Different classes need different stats to be able to survive the slaughter.

 

As far as multiplayer is concerned, the game resembles WoW more closely than D2.

 

Some first impressions. First of all I think the game is quite good and well made, the combat mechanics are somewhat different from diablo II and gameplay certainly feels different. I like the multitude of viable alternatives for character builds at least on lower difficulties, I'm sure it might be more restricted on hell or inferno difficulties but I'm not there yet (playing as wizard).

Then the dislikes. I do not like the fact that the game basically forces you to use the auction house to get any reasonably well suited gear for your character. The sheer number of possible drops makes it improbable that anything very good for your character drops. My wizard is currently undergeared in many departments and it's really starting to show against the bosses that are killing me in a all to frequent pace. At least death is quite mildly punished in the game compared to its predecessor.

I want to spend my time playing the game and getting my own stuff, NOT playing a MMO and going through gear listings in the auction house. I haven't actaully bought anything from there since I try to avoid using it to the last. I also hear that the gear found in each difficulty becomes more or less useless in the next difficulty, forcing you to keep your gear up to date, which is quite difficult without using the auction house.

The mandatory online play also creates problems with lag, but I'm used to that from diablo II times so lag deaths don't bother me that much unless they become all too frequent.

All in all it's a good game. Worth the money and worth the effort but I can't see myself playing this as it is all too long. I assume at some point the life of my wizard will become waaaay too difficult without using the auction house and at that point my interest will probably drop but I'm pretty sure I can finish at least Nightmare before that happens, but I doubt my character can survive hell.

 

My witch doctor just hit level 60 last night, in the very beginning of Act 4, hell difficulty. As a huge D2 necromancer fan, I decided to run my WD as a summoner, hoping that it would be as rewarding as it was with the necro in Diablo 2. I avoided the auction house entirely in normal and through most of nightmare, and did perfectly fine. Near the end of Nightmare I found that my summons were dying way too easily, and I began adjusting my build to rely less on summoning and more on crowd control. Mind you, I didn’t want to move away from summoning, but I felt somewhat compelled to in order to progress through the game without dying a lot.

It was around that time that I began checking out the auction house, to see if I could find any gear that might help me to be more successful as a summoner – particularly looking for items with life regen and thorns, as the WD’s pets can share those with the proper passive skill. Once I started with the Auction House, I sort of became a junky, especially as I got into hell difficulty and needed to boost my damage and my overall survivability.

Yeah, it does rather suck that the game pushes you hard in that direction in order to be successful and keep the difficulty levels manageable. Some blue monsters I’ve encountered regenerate health so fast, that it’s essentially impossible to kill them without high enough damage output. I also had to come to grips with the fact that the summoner is not viable at higher levels, much to my dismay. I ended up going with a zombie bear build (which is essentially a nuker build) that has lots of crowd control going on.

At any rate, I managed to find some pretty good gear on the auction house, and sell some of the stuff that I found for a decent profit. I currently have around 600k gold, and a number of items on auction or waiting to go on auction.

At present my Witch Doctor has over 46,000 life, around 3,500 armor, and is dishing out around 7,000 dps. It is certainly possible to do a lot better, but I find that with these stats I’m able to carve a pretty good swath through the demons that hell difficulty throws at me. I haven’t spent more than 50 – 60k gold on any item that I have thus far, and usually I look for the guys who are selling stuff way below average, so I have found a number of great items for less than 10k gold. And as I level up, I periodically upgrade those items for better ones, while selling off my previous ones, often for more than I bought them for.

Overall it’s been an enjoyable experience – in spite of the fact that I had to all but ditch my summoner concept (that was a tough pill to swallow at first). I’m not sure that I’m overly interested in grinding my way through inferno at this point. It’s more likely that when I finish hell difficulty, I’ll go back to my level 25 barbarian, or possibly run a wizard or a demon hunter instead.

 

If it helps, summons (I don't like using the term "pets") do not scale with vitality. They mainly scale with weapon damage, resistances, dodge and armor. This extends to items that grant intelligence (damage and resistances for the WD), strength (armor) and dexterity (dodge). A warning on vitality - at some point in the game (starting around the last act of hell) monsters start to hit so hard that damage mitigation becomes a priority over HP increase. Even the ones you get from stacking intelligence.

I'm currently running a nuke/summoning build and soloing Act 2 Inferno. I've been farming so I can finally upgrade my gear - the mobs in Act 2 Inferno do significantly more damage than any other mob I've fought so far. I also stumbled on the Vision Quest/Bear build, I didn't like how it forced me to keep my summoning spells on cooldown so I respecced.

I don't think a pure summoner build is viable at the moment, although that may change in the future. The reason is because all the best gear for summoning is much too expensive. Good inferno gear with +armor, all resist and intelligence/slots/%damage reduction can cost a good 8M or higher, while a weapon with 1300+ DPS costs less than 5M, significantly less if you're lucky. My build basically focuses on keeping my pets alive by doing enough DPS so that health orbs are constantly being spawned. To do that I stack intelligence, resistances, armor and vitality, in that order.

 

That's really interesting information regarding what stats buff your summons (I don't necessarily like the term pets either, but I said it to differentiate between the the temporary summons, such as fetishes and suicide bears). Where is that information from?

My WD currently has 435 strength, 214 dex, which aren't all that high. Int is 1269 and vit is 1209. I may need to think about getting some armor pieces with a higher armor rating, as most of my items are in the 200 - 300 range at present. I have shoulders that are 422 and a pair of pants in my stash that are 417 (but with reduced vit/int from my current pants). My armor is still decent because I'm sporting a shield with 718 armor rating. I'm thinking that I will keep the 1 handed weapon/shield combo for the extra armor. My current weapon does 451.5 dps, which is awesome for hell difficulty, but likely won't cut the mustard in inferno. I've seen some 1 handers with more than 800 DPS, but they are quite pricey on the auction house. I may need to make a big purchase to get a semi uber 1 handed weapon.

2 handed weapons are certainly easier to get to higher dps with, but I like having nice mods on 2 items vs. only one, and a shield with high int and other good mods can increase combat effectiveness quite a bit. My current shield even has a chance to freeze enemies, which comes in handy.

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Regarding resists, how high should I be aiming for in Inferno? I have a couple of assorted items that boost resists to particular elements (no resist all gear at present), but these don't amount to much.

That said, my high int gives me what seems to be high resist (126 to all, I believe). How much higher do I need to go?

 

I got it from Blizzard's D3 forums (I've been avoiding other sites because of the hacker rumors) and personal testing. You read all kinds at the forums though, so beyond these I have no idea which other stats work. None of the pet guides gave been stickied so far. These stats are the easiest to test though, just remove all armor and use weapons/off-hands/rings/amulets with the same stats.

Since I don't know exactly how these stats work the best I can do is compare your stats with mine. Your int is much higher (my WD has 919) but I use a two-hand weapon. My damage (from the character window) was ~9.8k in Hell, currently its 12,787 and my vitality is only 600 (~21k HP). My resists are at 300 though (~50% reduction) which rises to 350 with 5 stacks Soul Harvest, and I have a total armor of 3.3k. I can survive 4 or more hits in Act 1 Inferno. The dogs die in 2 hits, Garg can survive long enough to tank 8 hits. None of them die if I kill fast enough and loot health orbs. Currently 3 hits from just about any mob in Act 2 is fatal. Garg goes down in 4 or 5, though I've seen him go down in 2 from an elite. Yep, I really need better gear.
The one good thing is that Act 2 mobs seem to have just about as much HP as Act 1 mobs. I think it might be best if you test your survivability in Act 1 Inferno first before switching gear, I'd suggest switching immediately if you had ~30k HP but you must have something like ~45k HP? And with good armor. It might be just as effective for Act 1 Inferno. Act 2 Inferno is different, though.

 

I'm not sure I really understand why Blizzard forces players to reverse engineer such important details. I mean, if you want to play an effective summoner, it would be kind of nice to, you know, understand how to improve that stats of your summons.

Interesting to compare another player's stats. You definitely have me beat in the damage department. When you say you went from 9.8k damage in hell to 12.7k in inferno, is that because you improved your weapon or something, or do you get a damage bonus in inferno over what you get in hell?

 

Bought a new weapon with 960 dps around the later half of Hell Act 4. They're pretty cheap at the moment, though as soon as you include +Intelligence or +crit rate in the AH search window the prices you get skyrocket. I pretty much need all the damage I can get, since my only damaging skill (besides the summons) is Plague of Toads.

 

Nice. I finally killed Diablo in Hell difficulty this evening. It was a rather tough fight at ~7k DPS. And there was one battle on the way to him that I couldn't beat... 3 enemies that weren't taking ANY damage from me. I lured them to one side of the map, they killed me, and I portaled back in and stayed clear.

Those 2 things convinced me to make my largest purchase to date, a 1 handed weapon that does 653.4 dps, which I purchased for 400k gold. It also has 124 int and 116 vitalit, among other mods. DPS is now over 10k and life is close to 49k. Opening part of Act I in inferno is push over easy so far. I'm sure it will become a lot tougher soon.

 

I have gone a completely different route. I play my wizard and have been and will continue to focus on dmg. The people I play with said that I had to start stack defence and vitality. I don't want to tank. I want to kill!

Playing alone is generally easier than going as a group at least up to early inferno where I have played. A lot more fun as a group though.

 

I've come to the point where I simply can't rely on my summons anymore. The dogs are still useful for the Sacrifice rune Provoke the Pack, but the Gargantuan can no longer survive without Big Bad Voodoo rune Ghost Trance. I blame my gear (if you haven't done so yet try searching the AH for high-end legendaries. They're as stupidly powerful as they are expensive).

 

Ok, Inferno is great, in a team. Doing the same thing you have done three times before with the only exception stupidly powerful enemies isn't very fun. Especially not when you have to farm to get gear/money to be able to go to the next act. The jump in difficulty between act1 and act2 inferno is almost as big as between hell and inferno. So, you need to improve your gear. Doing it alone is boooring.

Doing it as a group is fun. You trade drops, you laugh at each other when you get instagibbed and you really all run around like headless chickens. Seeing as some combinations of abilities monsters have are neigh on impossible for certain classes being part of a group spreads the risk. A combo my wizard struggles with is something my barb mate find easy and vice versa. Quite a lot of packs when one or the other of us have spent most of the fight dead while the other have had no problem whatsoever.

 

According to Blizzard, WD summons are underpowered. They should be receiving some buffs at some point in a future patch: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5596252588

Having them scale with player vitality sounds like an excellent start.

 

I like the little fetishes, they seem to survive anything. Wish they lasted a bit longer than 20 seconds though! Or at least lower the cooldown a bit - 120 seconds is so excessive.

 

The dogs definitely have very limited survivability but I honestly don't think they should scale with vitality. The Gargantuan could do with armor/resistance/damage absorption improvements though, so I don't need to sacrifice two skill slots (Big Bad Voodoo's Ghost Trance and Spirit Walk's Healing Journey) -and- two passives (Fierce Loyalty and Zombie Handler) just to keep him alive. Him scaling with vitality sounds just about right. The dogs should just be invulnerable, imo, like the hydra. Since the dogs no longer need an HP boost Zombie Handler and Fetish Sycopanths should be combined (Jungle Summoner, or whatever).